That saying of Canterton’s, “People are much happier than you imagine” haunted Eve’s consciousness, walked at her side, and would not suffer itself to be forgotten. She had moments when she suspected that he had spoken a great truth. He had told her once to read Walt Whitman, but of what use was that great, barbaric, joyous person to her in her wilful viewing of sociological problems? It was a statement that she could test by her own observations, this assertion that the majority of people are happy. The clerks and shopmen who lunched in the tea-shops talked hard, laughed, and made a cheerful noise. If she went to the docks or Covent Garden Market, or watched labourers at work in the streets, she seemed to strike a stolid yet jocose cheerfulness that massed itself against her rather pessimistic view of life. The evening crowds in the streets were cheerful, and these, she supposed, were the people who slaved in shops. The factory girls out for the dinner hour were merry souls. If she went into one of the parks on Sunday, she could not exactly convince herself that she was watching a miserable people released for one day from the sordid and hopeless slavery of toil. The mass of people did appear to be happy. And Eve was absurdly angry, with some of the prophet’s anger, who would rather have seen a city perish than that God should make him appear a fool. Her convictions rallied themselves to meet the challenge of this apparent fact. She contended that this happiness was a specious, surface happiness. One had but to get below the surface, to penetrate behind the mere scenic effects of civilisation to discover the real sorrows. What of the slums? She had seen them with her own eyes. What of the hospitals, the asylums, the prisons, the workhouses, the sweating dens, even the sordid little suburbs! She was in a temper to pile Pelion on Ossa in her desire to storm and overturn this serene Olympian assumption that mankind in the mass was happy. In walking along Southampton Row into Kingsway, she passed on most days a cheerful, ruddy-faced young woman who sold copies of _Votes for Women_. This young woman was prettily plain, but good to look at in a clean and comely and sturdy way. Eve glanced at her each day with the eyes of a friend. The figure became personal, familiar, prophetic. She had marked down this young woman who sold papers as a Providence to whom she might ultimately appeal. It seemed to her a curious necessity that she should be driven to try and prove that people were unhappy, and that most men acted basely in their sexual relationships towards women. This last conviction did not need much proving.